Category Archives: wm6

stop wm6 from always using internet sharing

Computer Aid Posted on by

My trusty old HTC Touch 3G (Windows Mobile 6.1) had developed a strange fault:

I would plug in in to my PCs USB port, and it would always try to connect using internet sharing (which I didn’t want it to do, as my PC already had an internet connection), and I couldn’t get it to connect via Activesync or as a USB drive.

No amount of changing default connection type or setting / unsetting the “ask me at connection time” would change this behavior.

Since Since most of my data is now in the Google cloud, it wasn’t a major problem, however, I often needed to transfer data to and from my phone.

I then stumbled onto the solution:

  • Plugin the phone via USB
  • wait until it connects (internet sharing)
  • unplug the phone
  • within a few seconds, plugin the phone again!

Its very strange behavior, but it did let me transfer data.

The Activesync connection was still a problem, and I really wasn’t interested in wasting time trying to find a solution to a Microsoft-induced problem.

For the record: My HTC Touch 3G has since died, and I’m now the proud owner of an Android-powered HTC Desire… Personally, I find that there is little difference between the iphone and Android… but they are both way ahead of Windows Mobile 6.1.

I’ve had little chance to try the latest windows mobile 7, but I hope to try it out soon.

What is Microsoft Direct Push?

Computer Aid Posted on by

I have a HTC Touch 3G phone, and to increase battery life, I often go to the Communications Settings and enable/disable WiFi… depending on the presence of any nearby WiFi hotspost.

Communications settings has some useful switches for bluetooth, Airplane mode, etc…

But it has a setting that has puzzled me for a while: Microsoft Direct Push.

Since my phone is based on Windows Mobile 6.1, its not surprising that it has some Microsoft aspects.

So, my curiosity eventually got the better of me, and I decided to find out what is Microsoft Direct Push (MDP), and if it would be of any use to me.

It turns out that MDP is a method for getting notified about emails in about 15 minutes of them arriving, and allowing the new email to be downloaded… all very good in theory.

However, I find the biggest flaw, is that MDP is specifically tied to Microsoft Exchange Server.

Its good if you need to keep your Microsoft outlook synchronised between the mobile and office.

But in this day and age, I see an ever-decreasing use of microsoft server products… in favour of more common (and free) technologies that offer similar performance, and are more flexible due to not being tied to propriety standards like MDP.

In my case, I use Gmail (with the IMAP option enabled), and Google calendar (also synced to my phone), and a synced google contacts… all easy and all free, and can be used by anyone with a smartphone.

I suspect my solution will also work with iphone, and android-based phones.

So I now find there is no longer the need to go down the expensive Microsoft path, for mobile office solutions.

syncing Google Contacts: surname last

Computer Aid Posted on by

I’ve been going through my customer contact list (currently in Google Contacts), and spent some time exporting my MYOB contact list and merging it with my google contacts, in order to get a consistent list.

After having completed the whole process, I eventually realised that google sorts names differently from most people:

Names are assumed to be First/Given name first, then middle name(s), then Last/Surname.

Unfortunately, I only realised this after I had everything sorted…

So my list has names like: Blogs, Joe

But on my WM6.1 smart phone, it results in names Joe, Blogs,

Note the extra comma.

While my Nokia 6220 Classic has names like: Blogs, Joe (but when you look at the contact details, it breaks it down into:

Last Name: Joe

First Name: Blogs,

But there is some good news (for me at least): it actually doesn’t matter much.

A search for something like “joe” or “blogs” on either WM6, Nokia, or Google Contacts, will result in the correct entry being found.

Maybe one day, Google will add the ability to intelligently specify how the name field is to be split.

Cannot get channel 13 wifi (802.11) on wm6

Computer Aid Posted on by

I had an unusual situation, where my Wm6 phone (htc touch 3g) would not connect to a wifi router (802.11G) that was set to channel 13.

I’m in Australia, so I should be able to use channels 1 – 13.

Whats unusual, is that an Asus eee laptop would find and connect to the wifi, but my phone wouldn’t, and a PC with a wifi usb adapter also wouldn’t.

The solution was to simply change the Wifi router channel to something in the range of 1 – 11.

But that made me curious: Why couldn’t my (quite new) phone connect to channel 13?

I know my timezone and geographic regions are set to Australia, yet the phone cannot see channel 13.

My next step was to do an internet search for a way to “enable” access to channels 12 and 13.

But it seems that there are a few other people out there, with similar problems, but nobody with any solutions.

I did a quick search for some obvious registry settings (80211, region, wifi, etc), but nothing useful.

Unless someone out there has an answer, it seems like wifi on the Windows mobile platform (version 6.1) cannot support wifi channels 12 and 13.

activesync 4.5: critical communications services have failed to start

Computer Aid Posted on by

Ah, ActiveSync 4.5 for my windows mobile seems to become increasingly “annoying”.

The most annoying problem is that when I have my htc touch connected to the PC (for charging and for syncing), ActiveSync will start every 2 minutes (and take about 1 minute to synchronise).

That, in itself is not a problem, but while syncing, my phone is so slow, that its virtually unusable.

Looking at activesync on the PC, I see that the entire “tools” menu is greyed out… so I can’t adjust the sync frequency.

I find a registry setting that will re-enable the Activesync menus… that works well, but even setting the sync frequency to “manual” doesn’t change how often the WM6 phone actually syncs… grrr

and to top it off, navigating through the phones filesystem using windows explorer on the PC stopped working.

activesyncIf I click on “Mobile Device” under “My Computer”, I get: “critical communications services have failed to start”

Luckily the fix is simple:

From a command prompt: netsh winsock reset catalog

Then restart the PC.

pocket outlook on wm6: inefficient email storage

Computer Aid Posted on by

I have about 7000 emails (including sent emails) stored on gmail (in about 200 folders).

So I figure I’ll setup my smartphone to synchronise with gmail using imap. So that I don’t overload the phones tiny memory, I decide to download only the email headers (not the main email body).

This should let me see the structure of my email account, and only download the actual email if/when I need to.

It shouldn’t be hard, right?

wm6

Well,  my sent email folder has about 2500 emails, and in the process of downloading the headers, I get an “out of storage space” error.

A bit of research later shows I can actually move the downloaded headers to the 2Gb micro SD card in the phone. Of course you can’t do this without a registry hack… not something most users can do. Why does Microsoft insist on putting roadblocks in its operating systems?

Anyway, using the SD card will be a bit slower, but should prevent the out of storage memory problems.

While researching, I find something interesting: pocket outlook seems to store each email header in seperate file in the windowsMessaging folder… all up, over 3000 before I got the error message.

Now thats really inefficient. A perfect way to slow down the whole phone: dump thousands of files into 1 folder. I can’t see why pocket outlook can’t use a database file like outlook, thunderbird, and any other decent email system out there.

Now that emails are being stored on the flash card, the process gets much further (take a few hours longer to download headers), until I get another error. This time, I see the “Program memory” has dropped from about 25Mb free to less than 1Mb, so its another memory problem.

After this, pocket outlook will refuse to download any more emails, so its a case of delete all the stored emails, and try again.

I eventually get tired of trying to work around pocket outlook, and decide to try a third party email solution.

I tried flexmail, and it seemed a bit better and faster (at least it stores the emails in a proper database), but it also ran out of main “program” memory, despite flexmail (and the emails it synchronises with the server) being installed on the storage card.

However, as I download more email headers, flexmail slows more and more. I suspect its due to the flash card being slow.

But the nice thing about flexmail, is that it can be tailored.

So now the only path left to me it to trim down the number of emails I download. So I set flexmail to only download the last 60 days.

I clear all the email headers from the sent folder, and then configure only that folder, so that it downloads just the last 60 days… and then flexmail works beautifully.

Since Pocket outlook has similar functionality, I set it up to do the same thing, and then ditch flexmail… why?

Well, certain email shortcut buttons on the phone will start pocket outlook, even while flexmail is the default email program. So I go back to using whatever came with the phone, even if its not “efficient”, its a hell of a lot more convenient.

I cant help feeling like i’m in the old days of MSDOS, where you could only run programs in 640Kb, and to use any more memory, you needed to do all sorts of tricks, and even then you couldn’t be sure any application would work correctly in the expanded memory…

Many smartphone users are not technical, and they don’t care about the difference between internal 64Mb ram and a flash card… they just want it to work.

I havent tried any of the other smartphones out there (iphone, android, webos), so I hope they handle things better.

I’d say an average user won’t be able to use many of the wm6 features (particularly if they have a lot of emails), without hitting the “limits” of the wm6 architecture.